Facebook acquires shopping search site TheFind

San Francisco: Facebook Inc. is buying TheFind Inc., a search engine for Web shopping, as the world’s largest social network seeks to make more money from people shopping online.TheFind, based in Mountain View, Calif., “allows shoppers to search hundreds of different sites for particular products at once,” the San Jose Mercury News reported.

“Key members of our team are joining the company and will be working hard to integrate our technology to make the ads you see on Facebook every day better and more relevant to you,” the company said.Facebook FB -1.11% has acquired shopping search engine TheFind.com, signaling the social networking giant’s continued aspirations in two of the Internet’s biggest money-makers: search and e-commerce . The deal, announced by the TheFind after Friday’s closing bell, is “less about ecommerce and more about targeting advertisements” for Facebook, according to the paper. “Together, we believe we can make the Facebook ads experience even more relevant and better for consumers,” the Mercury News quoted Facebook as saying. “Our business is about connecting people with the topics, companies, brands, and increasingly products they care about and we look forward to doing that with TheFind on board.” TheFind was understandably giddy about the deal, coming as it did nearly a decade after its founding, posting “We are joining Facebook!” in big letters on its home page. “For the last nine years, we’ve worked hard to bring you a shopping experience that’s easy, efficient and fun—searching all the stores on the Web to find just the right products you’re looking to buy,” the company said. “We are now starting our next chapter by combining forces with Facebook to do even more for consumers. TheFind’s technology will help make Facebook’s ads more oriented around products, said the person, who asked not to be identified because the information isn’t public. Facebook’s resources and platform give us the opportunity to scale our expertise in product sourcing to the over 1 billion people that use the platform.” TheFind said that “key members” of its team would be joining Facebook.

But so far, the company has failed to gain the traction it has in connecting friends and family by letting them share posts about everyday life and photos. While Facebook has sought to find ways to profit from people finding things to buy as they browse their social networks, it hasn’t always succeeded. Users of the site won’t be able to do shopping searches through thefind.com for long, however—the company said it “will be taking our search engine offline in the next few weeks.”

The company’s initial plan to get retailers to sell goods on their Facebook pages fell apart, with several major retailers pulling their stores in 2012. TheFind, founded in 2006, had previously raised $26 million in venture capital from Bain Capital Ventures, Lightspeed Ventures, Redpoint Ventures, and Cambrian Ventures.